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I recently came across my third and fourth birthday cards from my grandfather. After an interval of decades, they were both strange and completely familiar. The pictures of little girls convey my grandfather’s perception of me, while his simple message, ‘To dear Anne with love from Grandad’, expresses more, in the way that words left behind by the dead invariably acquire an extra dimension not necessarily apparent during their lifetime. Most resonant of all, however, is my grandfather’s regular, slanted, upper case handwriting in blue-black ink; this was the script I loved first.

The cards launched me on a journey to my writing roots. Below my grandfather’s words are my own first words, an attempt to copy his, letter by letter. Odd how the word ‘LOVE’ is the most legible, the most confident, amid missing, crooked and inverted letters. An invented letter –  – has the mystery of a hieroglyph. While researching this article I discovered Gillian Clarke’s poem First Words (A Recipe For Water, Carcanet 2009) [reviewed in this issue – Ed], in which she recreates the wonder and urgency of learning language:

The alphabet of a house – air,
breath, the creak of the stair.

The experience is evoked through images embedded in her childhood landscape: “the steel slab / of a syllable dropped at the docks” and “the golden sentence / of a train crossing the viaduct”.

I was transported back to other ‘firsts’: writing on wide ruled lines (the frustration of falling off!); scratching chalk-words on a blackboard; forming cursive script on my first day at junior school to find that some letters flowed beautifully into each other, whereas others didn’t. Surely these ‘firsts’ presented a tangible connection to my current writing? As poets, through our years of writing, we strive to hold on to such excitement and other-worldliness; no wonder that essence is easily depleted or lost altogether.

Our first letters are so tactile, almost sculpted, then assembled like a mosaic, their cumulative effect not yet known. Each word, to a child, has the colour and texture of those glue-and-glitter words. Linda France, who collaborates with visual artists in the painting, carving and etching of her poems in public places, doesn’t wield the brush or chisel herself, but has observed the process closely, and comments, ‘Every single letter becomes more important. A shorter phrase asks for more attention. The spaces between the letters and the words are more significant.’

We can replicate the kinaesthetic method by, for example, writing with the non-dominant hand, and I’ve also scrawled a poem outdoors on a winter morning, my fingers frozen. Clumsiness can be revealing, and liberating. Denise Levertov’s poem Writing in the Dark (Selected Poems, Bloodaxe 1986) suggests another approach. Rather than switching on the lamp, she recommends keeping paper and a felt-tipped pen by the bedside for night-writing, a skill that can be practised until neither words nor lines overlap. Levertov claims the process yields “words that may have the power / to make the sun rise again”. Intrigued, I decided to experiment. It was harder than expected, because any pausing plunged me into darkness again, but next morning the words were pleasingly strange.

There are other ways of rekindling the beginner writer’s spark. Some years ago the poet and novelist Alison Fell introduced me to her extraordinary Cut-up Poem exercise. This entailed cutting up a piece of one’s own (preferably mundane) prose into individual words, which were put aside for a while, then poured out on a table, played with, and finally pieced together into a new creation that might almost have been someone else’s. I remember an exhilaration rivalling that of my first words. When a recent poem (from a sequence I’d been working on for a considerable time) struck me as rather listless, I cut it up; some fresh lines and surprising images emerged to re-energize the poem.

Etymology is my favourite recipe for exploring the limitless possibilities of every word. While writing a poem in which the subject of ‘worry’ featured, I discovered that it derives from the Old English ‘wyrgan’: to strangle. How apposite. I wove the new ingredient into my poem. Similarly fruitful are foreign language words with no equivalent in English. How about the German noun ‘Waldeinsamkeit’? Literal translation: the seclusion or solitude of the forest. But ‘Einsamkeit’ also means loneliness...

For me, the seduction of plumbing the depths of language is expressed most exquisitely in Chase Twichell’s enchanting poem Animal Languages (The Snow Watcher, Bloodaxe 1999), in which animal and human tracks in snow form a kind of conversation, trailing off in places, then resuming, and growing into ‘pages’ that might be read. This threshold is one the poet longs to cross:

I want to write in the language of those
who have been to that place before me.

Perhaps venturing into bleak or inhospitable territory, either physically or metaphorically, is the only way to recapture the passion of our first words.

Anne Ryland lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where she works as a tutor and workshop facilitator with community groups. Her first collection of poetry, Autumnologist, (Arrowhead Press, 2006) was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. She is now working towards completion of her second collection.